Many Weeks since the Panda Update - Any Improvements? [part 3]

[tedster]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

I'm not at all convinced that it's any kind of penalty

After some discussion, I think I should explain this a little more. There is one way we might say Panda is APPLIED like a penalty. You basically have two kinds of affected pages - the primary pages that Panda assessed as low quality, and then the rest of the site that received some kind a site-wide demotion.

IDEA ONE
The site-wide demotion is applied like a penalty in that a negative factor is consistently applied to rankings across a lot of pages. However, I'm not assuming that rankings will return after a set "time put" period in the penalty box. If Google feels they identified pages that give their users a poor experience, then they would not let those pages rank again just because a certain amount have time has passed.

IDEA TWO
The site-wide demotion seems to flow backwards through the site's internal linking. This I'm still not totally certain of, but there does seem to be a pattern that says "the negative site-wide factor is strongest for pages that are just one click away from the really bad page and not as strong for pages that are more distant."

Does "idea two" line up with what others see on affected sites?

[edited by: tedster at 3:01 am (utc) on Apr 8, 2011]

[Shatner]

This should probably be treated as rumor...

But I spoke to a friend who managed to actually get a couple of Google Engineers on the phone, and they told him in no uncertain terms that he should not expect to see his site or any site come back for 5 or 6 months at the soonest, and that this is the way it is for the long haul.

[walkman]

But I spoke to a friend who managed to actually get a couple of Google Engineers on the phone, and they told him in no uncertain terms that he should not expect to see his site or any site come back for 5 or 6 months at the soonest, and that this is the way it is for the long haul.

A friend of a friend... :)

I know that my site is much better than it was on 2/24 yet my traffic has drastically gone down.

I now that my site has zero content issues (assuming it had to begin with) and Google has indexed the changes of two weeks ago but I lost even more traffic.

So Google is out to ruin lives and all I can hope is that their power is greatly diminished.

[Jane_Doe]

5 or 6 months at the soonest, and that this is the way it is for the long haul.

Outland88 posted something similar -

For some reason he was almost jubilant about this. He bluntly stated many would go out of business simply because the traffic was to light outside of the major keywords to be profitable.

A bit harsh on their part, but I guess it could be effective. If they are going after the big content farms, the people with overhead like offices and payrolls and stuff, they could probably not keep their businesses together for too long without bringing in a comparative income.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 9:45 pm (utc) on Apr 15, 2011]

[walkman]

awhile to try to drive the spammers out of business.

Spammers are already working on getting links for their 6 weeks old domains.

[Shatner]

Spammers will be fine. They're just shifting everything to new domains which will instantly climb back up in the SERPS.

People with legitimate sites and legitimate brands can do that and they will be out of business.

The more I read, the more I really think this is Google's way of simply, quite literally, thinning the herd.

[Shatner]

>>I know that my site is much better than it was on 2/24 yet my traffic has drastically gone down.

Same here.

[Jane_Doe]

Spammers are already working on getting links for their 6 weeks old domains.

I changed my post to say to drive the content farms out of business. This update was more about getting rid of the $3 an article sites and the too many ads and affiliate links sites than spammers.

[johnhh]

they could probably not keep their businesses together for too long without bringing in a comparative income.

Yes had this about 5 years ago when we got hit - took 3 months +

However we are a bigger organisation now and do we have the resources to last that long .. guess that apples to quite a few

<edit> missed the other posts </edit>

[walkman]

I changed my post to say to drive the content farms out of business. This update was more about getting rid of the $3 an article sites and the too many ads and affiliate links sites than spammers.

Name one that went out of business? None, Mahalo fired 10% of the staff but that's it. Their content is still ranking for quite a bit and those companies have the resources to outlast small mom and pop sites.

Plus, out of business doesn't mean that their content will go offline

[c41lum]

What I dont get is that G keeps saying this is a automated Algo change, therefore if someone does the correct thing to their site, like remove pages and bulk up on quality then they should recover pretty quick (less some link juice from other hit sites). If thats the case why after 8 weeks has NO one reported a recovery. I think G has worked out how to slap sites down but NOT how to bring them back up 'post' panda.

@johnhh
We shouldn't have to throw good domains and sites away, Google should be a responsible and ethical company and show us away out of this mess. Why hasn't Matt Cutts came forward and said "hi guys here's a site that got hit, here's why they got hit, they have sorted themselves out and look they are back ranking again on a level playing field with everyone else.

Now that would be a useful youtube video! :-) Im a Dreamer I Know.

[Shatner]

>>>Name one that went out of business? None, Mahalo fired 10% of the staff but that's it. Their content is still ranking for quite a bit and those companies have the resources to outlast small mom and pop sites.

Give it time. It's only been 2 months, a lot are still holding on hoping it will get better.

There have been some layoffs though. AOL fired all of their writers from their blogs for instance. Don't know if that was Panda related, a lot of people who were hit by Panda aren't talking and didn't show up in the Panda Losers list (I know several like this). I know of several other big sites hit by Panda that will be making big cuts soon if things don't change.

Most of the people most hit you will never hear about because they are smaller websites that employ one or two people.

Also you're not taking into account all the freelancers content farms employs. No one will ever count them as "layoffs" because they aren't employees, but this will destroy their livliehood when those companies can't pay them anymore, just the same. We're talking about thousands and thousands of people here.

[Whitey]

I'm just reporting a phenonomen that might provide a clue on the quality signals.

A US site that i observe avoided being downgraded on the original Panda update. All other sites in a network connected to it with interlinks were effected in the Global roll out.

On the exact date of the global roll out, the US site took a Panda like hit of approx 33%.

I think it would be good if some folks analysed the impact of referring sites, as signals that Google uses in scoring the quality of content.

Another site that I observe is pure thin affiliate, but actually has great "authority" by virtue of good backlinks, age. Although i sense it's on the cusp of a downgrade - it survived with all it's top positions in tact.

My view is that this update relies on a number of factors apart from the pure quality of the onsite content. The question i think is in how the quality signals are scored.

[potentialgeek]

I have nine sites that escaped Panda 1.0 but got hit by Panda 2.0. Most of them are linked but sparingly with only one or two links per site (as opposed to every single page sitewide) to related content.

I had thought if there were only a few links it shouldn't be a problem (and it hasn't been until now). The last time they went after interlinked sites it was when there were footer links sitewide and the sites didn't have related content. (Google 950 Penalty?)

I saw another thread here where the webmaster said his sites had been hit and they were interlinked.

After some discussion, I think I should explain this a little more. There is one way we might say Panda is APPLIED like a penalty. You basically have two kinds of affected pages - the primary pages that Panda assessed as low quality, and then the rest of the site that received some kind a site-wide demotion.

Has Google had an algo update before with site-wide demotion?

It seems its standard has changed.

Old standard: We want to protect you from bad experiences on the landing page

New standard: We want to protect you from bad experiences on the landing page and any page on the site you visit from the landing page.

[johnhh]

Google should be a responsible and ethical company and show us away out of this mess. Why hasn't Matt Cutts came forward and said "hi guys here's a site that got hit, here's why they got hit, they have sorted themselves out and look they are back

Ha ! I don't think that is going to happen !

Just been comparing some old 2008 SERP keyword positions with as it is today - so far 95% have lower positions.

So Mr Google .. last week ( and for many years past ) you thought my site was fine - and today its not !

Given it took 3 months last time we were hit I have calculated that we don't have the resources to last that long and maybe I may have to look for ... hate to say it ... a job !

[ascensions]

So Mr Google .. last week ( and for many years past ) you thought my site was fine - and today its not !

Didn't you know, Google is bi-polar....

[Martin Ice Web]

Hey Guy,

lost about 40% of google traffic with panda.
Since yesterday, I see some slight recovering,
Previous ther was a massive google crawl.
As well as there seems to be two different databases that servs the google serps.

[danijelzi]

Hi, Martin Ice Web. Are you talking about slight recovery in US and international English-language rankings only? I hope you don't count rankings on local searches of foreign countries, since they're not affected.

I can say that I also see at least two versions of results in US SERPS for some queries. Some of them look like pre-Panda but appear rare, while some look like post-Panda (spammy) and are more often displayed.

[Martin Ice Web]

Hey Danijelzi,

foreign countries has been affected, too.
We are located in germany. With worldwide panda rollout massive serps changes occured and lost of many keywords in consequence.

[danijelzi]

As far as I know, searches on Google.de for example are not affected by Panda.

[indyank]

As a final step {especially with the recent second roll-out} some strong pages are located and boosted (possibly given an exception from the site-wide factor?). This happens even on sites that received a strong negative ranking overall.

Tedster, I too noticed that with the second update.I thought that some corrective actions would have improved those pages and was trying to find what helped them and not others. I couldn't find out any.

What do you think would have helped those few pages?

[Whitey]

foreign countries has been affected, too

Geo targets or language ? i think the current Panda changes only related to EN language. Y/ N ?

[robert76]

[online.wsj.com ]

Wall Street Journal article today concerning Panda affect on ecommerce.

[Martin Ice Web]

with panda roll out .de has been hit hard.
You can blend US/UK observation over .de serps.
Canīt believe itīs only EN language. Why? If it should hit farms and scrapers? They will use same technics on all languages. So panda shouldnīt have a language border?

[tranquilito]

Ironically, it seems that ever Matt Cutts blog posts are outranked by the scrappers [google.com ] ( read the last post by "ampercent" )

[walkman]

Part of the problem, Mr. Lieberman suspects, is his company has relied on manufacturer descriptions for the 30,000 products it sells. He says many of his competitors buy from the same manufacturers and use the same write-ups.

Mr. Lieberman has started paying free-lance writers to create original, more detailed product descriptions.

I don't blame the poor guy that sees his life slide away as Google engineers sip those lates, but now he will have a Made for Google site. What contribution is that to the web since they will be written by people that have zero clue about the products?

[potentialgeek]

A silver lining from the Panda 2.0 Update:

I started 2011 writing longer and more creative content on each new page. But, as fate would have it, Google judged me for all my old content, and its lack of creativity, uniqueness, and usefulness.

When I heard the process of recovery from Panda 2.0 is slow and not guaranteed, I looked for ways to make up the deficit from lost traffic and revenue.

I changed my site navigation and directed visitors to the new pages with more content. This has brought my Vibrant (text) ad revenue back up to pre-Panda 2.0 levels.

[brinked]

Ok some more encouraging news.

I have a site that was hit for panda 2. It has many pages and I tried to put as much unique content on "widget" pages as I can, even though my competitors dont put any unique text.

I hired a writer and she made unique 150-200 word descriptions for each. Most of these widgets used to rank top 10 for there respective search terms. Panda 2 the entire site was hit and these widget pages went to page 2 3 and beyond.

None of these widget descriptions had formatting. There was no paragraphs, no bold tags, no useage of any kind of tags just plain text slapped on each page without any kind of h2 heading as well. I formatted 2 widget pages, I added some bold tags threw in an italic tag for good measure, broke it down into 2 paragraphs, provided a unique h2 description I even got a little crazy and threw in an image of the widget for good measure.

Well as of yesterday 1 of these pages now ranks #1 ...yes #1 it was slapped to #16 for panda 2 and it was ranking #5 pre panda. Now it ranks #1. Like I said, a lot of us are going to come out better after panda then we did going in. This is forcing a lot of people to take a good hard look at there sites and improve on its weaknesses.

[walkman]

Looks like some Panda2 algo lines are getting reversed, but whatever hit in Panda is still there. And yes I have made many changes

[Shatner]

It's really starting to sound like in many cases that Google just cares about text and nothing else. Slap a bunch of random, bull#*$! text on your page and Google will like it.

Again in my case my heavily penalized pages are all text, thousands of words so clearly it's not an across the board answer, but it does seem to be the answer for some.

[brinked]

Shatner, read my reply just now in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

I think google is looking at where the text is placed and how much its being pushed down. For example, if I am searching for red widgets, and your site has the term red widgets all the way near the bottom of the page, pushed down by a widget or ad, google will panda that page/site.

In many instances websites follow a template, where ads push down a lot of the content, but in panda 2 I am seeing a lot of sites only effected in certain pages and not all.